Before I have even started writing this blogpost, I am in tears. I can’t help it. Time is not going to make it any better. I will always miss this horse. She was my everything, my biggest dream.
This is the first picture I was sent of my dream girl.
So tiny, beautiful, sweet and lovely!
(Getting this far in this post has taken me about an hour and a lot of tears. However, her story deserves to be told.)
So here we go…
This is Cortari, my special girl, we were such a team.
I have never seen anything so spirited and beautiful. She was just so full of life.
She was bred to jump, by Cortus / Cortez, and her mother was from a famous dam line in Sweden. Her mother competed to a good level in show jumping. Cortari definitly looked the part!
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She was so aware of everything and she knew what she wanted. Temperamental, determined, cocky, confident, cheeky and playful; she was a livewire destined for great things.
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She had a soft side she would fall asleep in my arms. So trusting.
Then disaster struck.
Cortari was playing with her friends in the field when she was about 1 year old. It ws a lovely quiet summer day with nothing unusual but when she came in her fetlock was turned under and she could not fully extend it. So we went to the vet.
We lived in the north of Sweden and the vets don’t see so much. They insisted on xraying her knee even though I kept saying they must xray the fetlock and arguing so much for it. I wanted to be able to get anothers opinion from the vets down south if these guys could not help. They refused.
We left the vets with a filly who would not go anywhere near a trailer with no answers and only pain.
They adviced a special shoe and that we walked her on hard ground as much as we could. We followed this advice but it kept on getting worse. We wanted to take her to another vet clinic but she refused to go in the trailer. We tried everything we knew and nothing worked, we had no help from specialist as we were so far away. This was breaking my heart. Watching my filly who had so much life and joy feeling more and more pain was so hard. Painkillers made no difference, nor the special shoe adviced.
She just kept on getting worse. We kept trying to load her but would she know be strong enough to stand for 4 hours to the other vet. Was it already to late?
She still had spirit.
But I was losing hope.
Sadly I was right, though I did not know it at this point.
She used to fall asleep in my arms, she had always done it. She was so trusting but now it was like she couldn’t find peace. She couldn’t find a place without pain to relax.
A called a lady who did something called The Horstmann technique.
As the treatment finished, she did it one last time.
She fell asleep in my arms.
I of course didn’t know it would be the last time, but it was.
I had to move abroad to work, the plan was she was ment to come to me- she never came.
One of the top vet/farrier came to hold a clinic and we begged him to look at Cortari.
He was horrified and wanted to teach all his delegates what to do if they came across this injury. If it had been treated correctly with a shoe opposite to the one my vet had prescribed it is totally treatable with a 100% recovery rate.
Cortari now had 1% chance of recovery due to the incorrect treatment and it all being to slow to get sorted.
Normally this vet would not try to treat this at this point, but agreed to give it a go.
If you look at these pictures you can see the positioning of the fetlock, this is how bad it had become.
We tried hard but the treatment didn’t work. No matter how much I wished for her to be in the 1%. It was simply too late.
So I want to say this; Trust your gut instinct and fight for your horse!
Don’t trust anyone just because they are the supposed experts. Ask around. Get other opinions.
These vets killed my horse, I will never forgive them.
Or forget her – My angel.
I wasn’t home, when she left us, I don’t think i could’ve actually, it was to painful, to sad.
This has been such a hard post to write, finding all pictures, putting this together, writing about her, brought her back to life for a moment.
I have enjoyed my time with her again, but now I need to stop.
I will always love her, she has a place in my heart that can never be taken.
My biggest love
Ancha XO
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